Saying you prefer bullets to ballots is often used as a shorthand for wanting revolutionary change rather than working within the system. But in fact, the politics of armed struggle and electoralism can have a surprising amount in common – they’re both ways in which mass participation can be cut off, when decisions stop being collective things that everyone takes part in and are instead left to specialist representatives, whether they’re politicians or military specialists of one kind or another.

All of this is another way of saying that when I think about the big stories of 2015, and about trying to come up with some kind of a grand narrative to sum up the year, I keep coming back to the upsurge of (roughly) 2010-2012, a wave of, if not quite revolutions, then at least uprisings and insurgencies of various kinds, and the ways in which that wave was broken and rolled back. In first Libya and then Syria (and Ukraine could also be added to this list), that containment took the form of military conflict. In much of Europe and the US, the movement of the squares just came apart after failing to find any organisational forms adequate to take the movement beyond camping. And so we come to the return of the party, a form which had seemed so firmly exorcised in the various square occupations. Thinking about a lot of this year’s big stories, from the Greek referendum to the migrant crisis, I keep on seeing threads leading back to that movement, and the various ways it was broken up and contained. In the years to come, a lot will depend on whether that insurgent energy can be summoned up again.

2015 in learning the Prime Minister fucked a pig

We found out that David Cameron put his cock in a dead pig’s head. I can’t believe I forgot to include that in the first draft of this piece.

2015 in war and terror

When thinking about the year’s events, one obvious, if grim, bookend is offered by the two ISIS massacres in France at the beginning and end of the year. These attacks were, in quite a real sense, aimed against you and me. You may or may not shop for kosher food, like the Eagles of Death Metal, or eat in Cambodian restaurants, but if we don’t accept an artificial separation between French and Turkish or Kurdish lives, then the French attacks have to be understood as part of the same sequence as the massacres in Suruc and Ankara. If we can’t trust “our” states to protect us from ISIS, we certainly can’t see ISIS as some kind of “lesser evil” either.

So if airstrikes are a shit response to ISIS, what would a good one look like? A lot of people have seized on Rojava and the struggle being fought by the YPG/YPJ militias there. There’s been a lot of debate about what exactly is happening in Rojava, and as someone living thousands of miles away who’s never visited the place I’m hardly in any position to offer any definitive answers. But I think it’s possible to be attentive and open to the various anarchist and left-communist criticisms of what’s going on there and still think that it’s a lot better than any other alternatives. At the end of the day, the situation’s such a tangled mess that any position is almost bound to get caught up in contradictions – hard-line anti-militarists getting all excited about a war, people proclaiming their support for the PYD while opposing the airstrikes that the PYD welcome – but it’s hard to see how you could avoid these contradictions, other than just by repeating eternal principles with little to say about the specifics, and so ending up with an analysis along the lines of “everything is bad, everything is as bad as everything else”.

And one final thought on the subject: many discussions of ISIS have stressed their fanatical, anti-rational appeal. Put mildly, those who’re drawn to ISIS are never likely to be won over by the politics of the moderate center. Perhaps the most useful thing we can do to fight jihadism is to revive the millennial aspects of our own politics, to start offering a new fanaticism that could provide a possible rival. Why is it that the critique of this world offered by the caliphate seems more tempting to many people than that of anarchism/communism, and what can we do to change this?

First, there’s the problem of the actually existing Labour party machine as a functioning part of the austerity state in many parts of the country. However much the recent joiners may be totally opposed to the old Labour “moderates”, it’s still those “moderates” who are running councils and implementing cuts across the country. It’s still unclear how the Labour Party will cope with the pressures of attempting to become an anti-austerity movement while also actually implementing the cuts in many areas. And secondly, less obvious but equally important, there’s the danger of everything becoming about Corbyn. If you want to solve the housing crisis by building more affordable housing, that’s great; if you support Corbyn because you think he has good policies to solve the housing crisis, that’s fine; but if you spend more time talking about Corbyn and defending him from various forms of media bullshit than you do actually talking about the housing crisis (or whatever other issue matters most to you), then you have a problem. Again, this was seen in the aftermath of the vote for airstrikes on Syria, when the media attacked Corbyn for going to the Stop the War Christmas party: everyone correctly recognised this as the media having a go at Corbyn, and in the aftermath we saw lefties discussing whether this meant that everyone should rally round StW out of solidarity with Corbyn, or whether Corbyn should disassociate himself from StW to make his life easier… and once you’ve accepted this framing of things, it’s really easy to drift into forgetting that the important thing is not “how will this affect Corbyn” but “how will this affect people living in the areas targeted by airstrikes?”**** It can be tempting to have a figurehead in the media, putting across arguments that make some kind of sense for a change, but there’s always a great danger attached when it leads to accepting the media’s point of view, where the Big Man is all that counts and the rest of us fade out of sight.

As we move into 2016, the appeal of the ballot box shows no signs of fading. One particularly important test will be the London Mayoral elections, where the Take Back the City platform has been formed by people wanting to offer an electoral voice to the capital’s social movements – an idea that may have seemed pretty straightforward halfway through last year, but will prove a lot trickier now that a huge section of the nation’s lefties have been re-convinced that Labour can offer an adequate home for progressive hopes (even if the actual candidate is not particularly left). Mix this up with the fact that there are still those activists involved with the Greens and even the husk of TUSC, if that’s still going by then, and you can see how the simple, reasonable-sounding idea of “hey, kids, let’s put on a Mayoral candidate!” can become a recipe for vicious infighting. If anyone who’s involved in practical grassroots organising in London is reading this, then I’d like to plead with you to adopt this new year’s resolution: where you’re involved in on-the-ground organising with people from different ideological backgrounds, please, please don’t let any genuine organising efforts be disrupted by stupid shit like who to back for some daft mayoral election.

2015 in other stuff

Of course, of the many possible responses to the Syrian conflict, there’s one that’s proved very popular among people in the most affected areas, a perfectly sensible response that’s as old as war itself: the impulse to get as far as possible away from the frontline. And so it is that the war in Syria ended up being a major contributor to another of 2015’s major stories – the migrant crisis, the point at which the border regime of Fortress Europe started to look increasingly unstable. This is perhaps the area where mass direct action from below was most visible last year: from the huge numbers of people taking practical action to improve their lives by fleeing, and launching hunger strikes and blockades to try and crack the borders they came up against, to the huge outpouring of compassion and solidarity directed at making refugees welcome in the countries they arrive in. Between the fierce determination of those making their way across the borders and the empathy shown by those welcoming them, it’s perhaps here that a genuinely positive mass politics became most visible.

But just as the year saw some promising tendencies in the direction of solidarity and internationalism, it also saw the continuation of various forms of grim nationalism. In the UK, it feels like the days of the EDL being able to pull together big populist street mobilisations around a relatively “soft” racist agenda are long gone, as UKIP has provided a handy electoral home for people who aren’t keen on immigrants but also can’t be arsed with standing around in the cold getting kettled, while the increasingly openly racist remnants of the far-right street movement are currently quite splintered. At the moment, the main threat posed by the far-right is more the danger of producing more Zack Davies/Breivik/Dylann Roof-types than the possibility that they’ll get anywhere by following a traditional march and grow strategy. Having said that, Dover did show the dangers of what can happen if racist mobilisations can pull enough of a crowd together, and while Liverpool was an exceptionally satisfying slapdown for one particular group of wannabe fuhrers, it’s always worth remembering how many mobilisations by the micro-groups go unopposed or almost unopposed, particularly in Rotherham, where a long series of far-right marches culminated in a racist murder. Of course, not many places have the unique combination of circumstances that have made Rotherham such a target for the far-right, but thinking about places like Rotherham, Preston or Stockton is an important counterweight to the London, or London/Brighton/Manchester, -centricity of much of the left.

Despite all the notes of hope, 2015 was, overall, a pretty miserable year in many ways. It’s probably safe to say that 2016 will be too. Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do with the memory of the last twelve months is to look for moments that seem like they point to potential futures and then think about how to prepare for them. The Greek experience is particularly valuable, in that the week or so leading up to the referendum gave a particularly clear glimpse of how international capital will treat any country that tries to experiment with alternatives to neoliberalism, and it’s something that enthusiastic members of Team Corbyn or even Team Saunders would do well to bear in mind. Equally relevant is the vision of the future offered by Cumbria, West Yorkshire and Lancashire over the last few weeks.

**** see, for example, from Matt Carr’s apology mentioned above: “I inadvertently provided ammunition to those who are seeking to use the Stop the War movement to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the movement itself.”

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About nothingiseverlost

"The impulse to fight against work and management is immediately collective. As we fight against the conditions of our own lives, we see that other people are doing the same. To get anywhere we have to fight side by side. We begin to break down the divisions between us and prejudices, hierarchies, and nationalisms begin to be undermined. As we build trust and solidarity, we grow more daring and combative. More becomes possible. We get more organized, more confident, more disruptive and more powerful."

I’m no trot but I actually don’t think the SW article misses by much. It isn’t apologism to recognise that jihad appeals to impoverished and marginalised people, it’s simply true. Along with the mediaevalism and necrophilia the daesh seems to have co-opted elements of the Maoist protracted peasant war. It’s just that having a cultural tradition political Islam is easier to sell in these places than Marxism-Leninism. You will often hear Syrians in the west speculate that their relatives are more at risk in areas controlled by Assad than the daesh enclaves; perhaps the western air strikes are meant to even that up.

No surprise then that the most successful actions against daesh have been conducted by those who, themselves have revolutionary intent. Like any fascist tendency it can only be defeated by working class autonomy. You can’t get away from the fact that ISIS, al-queda and the present toxic Sunni-Shia conflict are the products of a century of western and Russian imperialist meddling, playing one bunch of authoritarian gangsters off against another. It strengthens nationalism, sells arms and whoever comes out on top, the bourgeoisie cashes in. The blame lies with the global hegemony of the military-industrial capitalist market that forces people to make bad choices. We knew the end of history couldn’t last for long.

Yeah, obviously you can’t explain the rise of ISIS without looking at the role played by the West in the region and particularly the way the 2003 invasion created the power vacuum that enabled their rise, but (at the risk of going all Godwin’s law), you can’t give a full account of the rise of the original Nazis without talking about the treaty of Versailles and the humiliation inflicted on Germany by the Allies, but an article about the Nazis that just talked about how bad French and British imperialism was would be pretty suss, no? Without wanting to glorify the SWP’s past politics too much, I think there’s a world of difference between their Cold War-era slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow” and the politics of that article.